New Podcast Episode: Conquering the Divide

For thousands of years, no person had seen Montana's mountains from above. Only birds had ever seen their own shadows cast on the rooftop of that landscape. Then Wilbur and Orville Wright cracked controlled flight in 1903, and within a few years, daredevils were eyeing Montana's Continental Divide — wondering who would be the first to fly over it.

Episode 6 of Distinctly Montana Stories follows the contenders. There was Eugene Ely, the masterful pilot from Iowa whose career began as chauffeur to a speed-loving priest — the same Ely who made naval history by landing on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania. There was Bud Mars, the eleventh licensed pilot in the country, who crashed into a boulder in Magpie Gulch and was rescued by soldiers from Fort Harrison. And there was Cromwell Dixon, barely nineteen years old, who had built his first flying machine at fourteen and performed in the sky while his sister did vaudeville on the ground.

On a clear September afternoon in 1911, Dixon took off from the Helena fairgrounds, climbed to 7,000 feet, followed the smoke from a signal fire over the spine of the Rockies, and landed safely on the other side. The flight took just over half an hour. He collected a $10,000 prize, sent a telegram, got back in his plane, and flew home.

A month later, he was dead.

Conquering the Divide — written by Joseph Shelton for Distinctly Montana magazine — is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you listen to podcasts.